I had a day off and got the notification that the new Super Dragon Ball Heroes episode was just out. After watching it I got the spontaneous idea about subbing it. With expecting an English subbed version to be out soon I thought it would be an interesting task for me to translate the episode straight from Japanese into German.
Usually, subs for other languages (especially European) are made based out of given English translations from the original Japanese. It's convenient as the amount of people being able to translate from Japanese to other languages are rather limited. For me, with experience in the localization industry I'm aware that translations of translations often lose details from the original I thought trying it myself would be interesting.
Just for a note, I'm still far a away from being fluent in Japanese, let's say enough for daily conversations and reading mangas (even if it often takes some time, but that's a part of the game as a learner).
Anyway, as the eight minutes episode had not that many lines and was mostly about fighting I thought it would be a nice challenge as I enjoy following and translating Dragon Ball in its original.
Going through I found some lines where I really had to listen in 0.75 speed to understand exactly what was said. Despite that, with later comparisons after publishing on YouTube, I noticed that I got some translations wrong (even easy ones) and could have done better.
Mistranslations
Let's look at this line for example after Piccolo attacked Kamioren - that's what I heard:
すまんな。己技には貯めないるんだ。
Yet I'm not exactly sure whether it should be "己技", but he is clearly talking about his own attack.
The point I wanted to go into is the verb "貯める", so "to save". But as I couldn't understand this verb form still exactly I seemingly made a contextual mistranslation like:
"Sorry. But I couldn't hold back my attack any longer."
Like in "saving the attack for the right moment". However, since it's about the 魔貫光殺砲, the 貯める was rather about the charging process of necessary for the attack which is why Android 17 was protecting him while he charged. So it should rather be like: "Sorry. But this attack takes same time to charge."
While the dialogues between Hearts and Goku were quite good and quickly to understand, I also got a seemingly easy thing in the conversation between Zamasu and Trunks wrong:
答えると思うか?
Which simply means: "Do you think I will answer that?" What I heard was:
この耐えると思うか?
Meaning I understood: "Do you think I will endure with them?"
Just completely misheard the verb 答える here. Two little mistakes here, the rest seemed ok so far. Good listening practice.
Terminology concerns
Important for correct localization is getting the terminology of established terms right and consistent. As there wasn't much dialogue there were not too many things to look at. Maybe just one in particular:
At the next episode screen, the 宇宙の種 is in English translated as the "Universe Seed", which would be "Universumssamen" or "Samen des Universums" as a literal translation. Sounds a bit odd in German, and I guess that's why also other translators rather used "Kern" (engl. "Core"). It's not exactly wrong, for example "apple seed" are translated as "Apfelkern" into German. Also as it's about the "Core Area" (コアエリア) which support to use "Kern" here. But this could be up for debate. Let's see how it will be officially translated in a few years when the Universe Mission manga gets a release in Germany.
Further thoughts
Anyway, it was a good practice and a nice experience working on episode 13 of Super Dragon Ball Heroes.
It was too tempting not to try by the time I had, and I showed me that I need to improve more and more to get better so I will keep going.
In case you are interested, you can watch the episode here. By the time I typed this there were around 1000 views.
I guess I will do other episodes in the future if it fits with my schedule, so I don't feel obligated to. It's for personal fun with translations and Dragon Ball fandom.
So let's see and thanks for reading. If you find things I can do better, let me know in the comments or on Twitter.
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